Twenty Minutes in Zhongshan Hall: The Japanese Surrender in Taiwan, 1945

At ten in the morning on 25 October 1945, in the auditorium of the Taipei Public Hall, Ando Rikichi — the nineteenth and last Governor-General of Taiwan — signed the instrument surrendering the island's Japanese forces and administration to Chen Yi, representing the Allied commander in the China theatre. The ceremony took about twenty minutes. Fifty years of Japanese rule ended in the room, and Taiwan still marks the date as Retrocession Day.

The building had been chosen with some care. The Public Hall 臺北公會堂 was completed in 1936 to a design by Ide Kaoru, the Governor-General's chief architect, in the stripped, arcaded modernism the colonial government favoured in its last decades. It went up on the site of the Qing provincial administration office, which the Japanese had demolished — so the surrender was taken in a Japanese building standing on the foundations of the government the Japanese had displaced. It was renamed Zhongshan Hall within weeks, after Sun Yat-sen.

What followed is the part the anniversary tends to leave out. The administration Chen Yi installed treated the island as recovered enemy territory: monopolies, requisitioning, mainland appointees in the senior posts, and inflation that wiped out savings. Sixteen months later, on 28 February 1947, a dispute over confiscated cigarettes in Taipei set off an uprising and a military crackdown that killed thousands and opened the White Terror. Chen Yi was recalled, and eventually executed by his own government in 1950 for attempting to defect.

There is also a legal argument that has never gone away. Japan's formal renunciation of Taiwan came in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which named no recipient. Whether the 1945 ceremony transferred sovereignty or merely military administration is still argued in courtrooms and legislatures. That question sits, unresolved, in the room where the paper was signed.

Zhongshan Hall is open and in use — concerts, a café upstairs, exhibitions in the corridors. The auditorium is Zhongzheng Hall, on the second floor. Go up, sit in it, and note how ordinary it is: a municipal assembly room with good acoustics, which is where a fifty-year colony was handed over in under half an hour.

Where: Zhongshan Hall 中山堂, 98 Yanping South Road, Zhongzheng District, Taipei. National historic site, free to enter, closed Mondays. Ximen MRT is a short walk west.

Cover photo: Taipei Zhongshan Hall by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.